summary to 'analytic project of knowledge'

The analytic project will be following mainstream epistemology in focusing on the analytical project. Even if one grants that it is right to make propositional knowledge our focus, there are two worries about the analytic project that we should consider from the outset.

The first is whether knowledge is the kind of thing that one can analyse in the first place. The second is what it means to offer an analysis of knowledge. And we will start with the second worry.

The very strict way of understanding the analytic project is that what we are seeking are necessary and sufficient conditions that capture our every day, or 'folk', usage of them- i.e. which don't conflict with any of our folk talk regarding when a belief is, or is not, knowledge.

Clearly, however, we do not want to offer an analysis of a term that is completely theoretical-one that is completely divorced from everyday folk usage. Of course, it doesn't mean that we can summarily dismiss any disobedient linguistic data uttered by the folk,...the project is just that we should not think that our project is hostage to this data in the way that the overly austere conception of the analytic project suggests.

That is, if one held to the more austere rendering of this project, then one would tend to be very depressed about its prospects since apparent counterexample to any putative set of necessary and sufficient conditions would be very easy to find.

That I am here taking it for granted that, ideally, any analysis of knowledge will be reductive, in the sense that it would analyse knowledge in terms that don't make essential use of the concept of knowledge itself. As some have argued, perhaps we should treat knowledge as a primitive notion which we should use it define other key epistemic terms. (So-called 'knowledge-first' , T.Williamson)

Nevertheless, as we proceed, we will see that I have some sympathy with a third concern about the analytic project. This worry is that by making this project central to epistemology one thereby unduly skews one's understanding of the subject matter such that one is prevented from taking seriously other epistemic standing that don't play a role in one's theory of knowledge.

As we will see, however, this presupposition (i.e. the analytic project is that primary focus of the epistemological project, with understanding other epistemic standing) doesn't against pursuing the analytic project since we can draw out by getting a clearer grip on the natural knowledge.



pick up from Knowledge, Duncan Pritchard, 2009